Berean Standard Bible
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
King James Version
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
About this verse
In English this reads as description — "Love is patient, love is kind" — but in Paul's Greek these are verbs: love patiences, love kinds, so to speak. Fifteen actions in four verses, and not a single feeling among them. Love here is something done, mostly under provocation. The sharpest line is a bookkeeping term: "it keeps no account of wrongs" — love refuses to maintain the ledger where grievances earn interest.
The wedding favorite was written to a church in mid-fight. Corinth was quarreling over status and spiritual gifts, suing each other, splitting into factions — and chapter 13 interrupts Paul's discussion of gifts to say that gifts without love amount to noise. Read each phrase as a correction of something the Corinthians were actively doing — envying, boasting, self-seeking, keeping score — because it was.
It belongs at weddings, but its native habitat is ordinary conflict with unimpressive people, which is where all fifteen verbs get their exercise. Try the old and uncomfortable reading exercise: substitute your own name for "love" and see how far down the list you get before the sentence stops being true. The passage turns from poetry into a mirror — which is roughly what Paul intended it to do to Corinth.
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